Sounds of the Future: The New Season of The Israel Camerata Jerusalem

Would you like to be where the world is born anew?
Darius Milhaud, a French adventurer with Jewish roots, wrote a ballet-symphony in which chaos rhymes with jazz, and the saxophone flirts with the fugue.
In the hands of the Israel Camerata Jerusalem, this music becomes a street party with biblical scenery. Africa eavesdrops on Paris, Paris on Harlem, and all of it collides on the Holy Land, where the orchestra tosses notes as nimbly as a juggler with oranges. An exotic Adam and Eve (here they are called Sekoumé and Mbongwé) whistle in swing rhythm, while the serpent in the bushes cheekily keeps time in jazz. And perhaps this is exactly the universe where we’d want to find ourselves.

Personally, I long to—and who wouldn’t want to escape our mad world into one where music is created by one of Israel’s finest orchestras, and more? Especially since the opening concert of the season is titled “Sounds of the Future–The Great Artists of Tomorrow.” And rightly so, for the world will soon hear about these young musicians. The very first program is fantastic; have you, for example, heard the works of Caroline Shaw?

Caroline Shaw was born in North Carolina in 1982. In her compositions, she is free as the wind—moving from genre to genre, role to role, shifting expressive means at will. As Shaw herself says, she tries to imagine “a world of sounds that no one has ever heard before, but that has always existed.” Shaw is a producer, composer, violinist, and singer; at the age of 31 she became the youngest-ever recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, later adding a Grammy Award and an honorary doctorate from Yale University. She writes for concert and dance halls as well as film. Her Concerto for Piano and Strings, which will be heard in this Camerata concert with soloist Amir Ron, was written in 2023 for Byron Schenkman, artistic director of the Seattle-based ensemble. Shaw explains that the concerto uses the “familiar grammar” of Bach’s time, “but with a twist that spins a wild, strange, surreal story — an alternate reality that might well have existed.”

                          Avner Biron. Photo by Michael Pavia

The program opens with Mozart’s Symphony No. 1 in E-flat major, written by an eight-year-old boy in 1764–65, clearly under the spell of Johann Christian Bach. It was during the Mozart family’s European tour, in London, where young Wolfgang and his sister Nannerl entertained audiences and met the “London Bach.” When Leopold fell ill, the children stayed at home for a while, and little Wolfgang used the time to try his hand at symphonic writing — a work that lasts all of 12 minutes! Even here, one can already sense the seeds of the “real” Mozart: lightness, melodic invention, clarity of form. Though the texture is “student-like,” the effortless movement points forward to the future composer of Figaro. Already audible are traces of his style—theatrical flair, vocal lyricism, and a sense of stagecraft even in purely instrumental music. Essentially, this is a sketch, a miniature draft, of what will later grow into the mighty Jupiter Symphony, using the same building blocks but on the grand scale that the eight-year-old was only beginning to learn. How fascinating to glimpse the starting point of someone who, twenty years later, would write music that makes adults feel like children.

And now brace yourselves, saxophone fans! The Camerata will perform Alexander Glazunov’s Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra, with the dazzling young soloist Doron Hazan. Glazunov composed it in Paris in 1934, dedicating it to Sigurd Rascher, the German-American saxophonist and founder of the Rascher Saxophone Quartet, famed for his endless breath and mastery of the high register. Many composers dedicated works to him; he toured widely, taught in Copenhagen and Malmö, and later joined the Juilliard faculty in New York. Glazunov’s concerto—his last major composition—is written in a continuous single movement, in the tradition of the romantic symphonic poem. It sings in the same key as Mozart’s First Symphony, E-flat major—a deliberate choice by Camerata’s music director Avner Biron, who always constructs his programs with hidden threads.

Next comes Anton Webern’s Langsamer Satz (“Slow Movement”), a single-movement piece for string quartet from 1905, written after his first year of study with Arnold Schoenberg. Its late-Romantic language echoes Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. The manuscript was only discovered in the 1960s in an attic near Vienna. That same summer, Webern traveled with his cousin Wilhelmine, fell in love with her, and later married her — so this is, in essence, a love song to his future wife. Some believe it was meant to be part of a larger quartet, but Webern put it aside after finishing the movement and never returned to it.

                          Lior Yoahimik. Photo by Michael Pavia

                               Doron Hazan. Photo by Michael Pavia

Webern is followed by Rossini’s Introduction, Theme and Variations for clarinet and strings (1819), dedicated to his friend Alessandro Abbate, clarinet professor in Naples. Some claim the work might have been penned by one of Rossini’s contemporaries (perhaps Ferdinando Sebastiani or Ernesto Cavallini), yet the music is based on arias from Rossini’s operas Moses in Egypt and The Lady of the Lake. A virtuoso bel canto showcase for the clarinet, it will be performed by the marvelous Lior Yoahimik.

And then comes the cherry on top: Darius Milhaud, descendant of a Jewish family from southern France, member of the celebrated Le Groupe de Six, composer of some 450 works, forever drawn to adventure. One such adventure was the bold use of jazz rhythms and bitonal harmonies to depict the African myth of the Creation of the World. In the 1920s, Milhaud spent nights in Harlem jazz clubs; as he recalled, “some of them had singers accompanied by flute, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, percussion with a single player, piano and string quartet.” In his La création du monde (1923), the saxophone and double bass form an unprecedented pairing of baroque prelude and fugue with jazz idiom. Its Paris premiere was staged by the Swedish Ballet, with sets and costumes by Fernand Léger, inspired by African art and Blaise Cendrars’s retelling of creation myths. The ballet begins with chaos; earth and sky divide, and three African gods—Nzame, Mebere, and Nkwa—breathe life into trees and animals through rituals and spells. Trombone, saxophone, and trumpet voice this trinity in a jazz fugue. Flora and fauna are born to the sound of blues. Humanity appears: two violins oppose a bassoon that dances a cakewalk. A sensual dance unfolds until only one couple remains—Adam and Eve, or rather Sekoumé and Mbongwé. (According to legend, Sekoumé carved his wife from a tree.)

Leonard Bernstein once compared how composers used jazz, calling it “an apple.” In his words: “If jazz is an apple, then Darius Milhaud in La création du monde sits at the table, ties a napkin around his neck, and eats the apple delicately from a plate with a silver knife, peeling away the skin. Gershwin, in Rhapsody in Blue, simply plucks the apple from the tree and bites right in.”

                            Amir Ron. Photo by Michael Pavia

Sounds of the Future – The Great Artists of Tomorrow
Avner Biron, conductor
Amir Ron, piano | Lior Yoahimik, clarinet | Doron Hazan, saxophone
Mozart – Symphony No. 1 in E-flat major
Glazunov – Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra
Caroline Shaw – Concerto for Piano and Strings
Webern – Langsamer Satz
Milhaud – La création du monde

No doubt, after such a program, you will leave the hall with the uncanny feeling that the world has just been reinvented.

Dates:
September 12 – Tel Aviv Museum of Art
September 14 – Rehovot, Weizmann Institute, Sela Hall
September 15 – Jerusalem, YMCA
September 16 – Zikhron Yaakov, Elma Arts Center

Tickets